A Global View of Gene Activity and Alternative Splicing by Deep Sequencing of the Human Transcriptome
Marc Sultan, Marcel H. Schulz, Hugues Richard, Alon Magen, Andreas Klingenhoff, Matthias Scherf, Martin Seifert, Tatjana Borodina, Aleksey Soldatov, Dmitri Parkhomchuk, Dominic Schmidt, Sean O'Keeffe, Stefan Haas, Martin Vingron, Hans Lehrach, Marie-Laure Yaspo- Multidisciplinary
The functional complexity of the human transcriptome is not yet fully elucidated. We report a high-throughput sequence of the human transcriptome from a human embryonic kidney and a B cell line. We used shotgun sequencing of transcripts to generate randomly distributed reads. Of these, 50% mapped to unique genomic locations, of which 80% corresponded to known exons. We found that 66% of the polyadenylated transcriptome mapped to known genes and 34% to nonannotated genomic regions. On the basis of known transcripts, RNA-Seq can detect 25% more genes than can microarrays. A global survey of messenger RNA splicing events identified 94,241 splice junctions (4096 of which were previously unidentified) and showed that exon skipping is the most prevalent form of alternative splicing.